All posts tagged Kirsten Gillibrand

WASHINGTON — New York’s U.S. senators want the Army Corps of Engineers to build a “post-Katrina-style” series of flood defenses running along the state’s southern coast from Staten Island to Montauk.

Sens. Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand said Wednesday that they plan to try to win funding in the coming weeks for a series of projects that the Army Corps has already approved, like the construction of sea wall on the south shore of Staten Island and larger dunes in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, left, and Republican challenger Wendy Long during a debate at Skidmore College on Wednesday.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and her Republican challenger, attorney Wendy Long, laid out starkly different visions for government in their only debate Wednesday.

Unlike Republicans running for Senate seats in other Democratic-leaning states, Long made virtually no concessions to New York’s relatively liberal electorate. She ruled out raising taxes, spoke about how she believes human life begins at conception and repeatedly attacked President Barack Obama.

Down by roughly 40 points in recent polls and viewed as a long shot by most non-partisan analysts, Long attacked Gillibrand repeatedly on issues ranging from the state’s lagging economy to the scandal around former Brooklyn Democratic party chairman Vito Lopez. Read More »

Fifty-four percent of likely primary voters said they plan to vote for the former Massachusetts governor, while 21% back Rick Santorum. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has the support of 9% of voters and 8% back Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

Romney’s support is broad in New York. He doesn’t receive less than 40% of the vote among the poll’s different groups, including tea party voters, conservatives and those without college degrees.

New Yorkers have already helped Romney in the Republican primary. Of the $74 million his campaign had raised by the end of February, 13% came from New York, the most of any state. Read More »

Democratic U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has her highest-profile challenger yet: Rep. Robert Turner, the Republican businessman from Queens who scored an upset victory to take the congressional seat vacated by Anthony Weiner.

Turner is more well known than the three other Republican candidates currently in the race, but he would still be an underdog against Gillibrand, who had more than $8 million on hand at the end of last year and has seen her approval ratings rise in recent months. The Democratic senator easily won a special election in 2010 to fill out the remainder of Hillary Clinton’s term after she resigned to become secretary of state.

Turner’s district appears likely to be eliminated in the decennial redistricting process, which would force him to run against an incumbent Democrat in a less-friendly district. A former television executive, he said the same concerns about the economy that motivated him to get into the House race last year are spurring him to run for Senate now. Read More »

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand enjoys a massive lead over two potential challengers as she faces re-election a year from now, according to a new poll.

The survey, released Tuesday by the Siena Research Institute, found a majority of New Yorkers would vote to re-elect the upstate Democrat and 49% viewed her favorably.

Gillibrand, who does not poll as high as her nearest peers in statewide politics, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sen. Charles Schumer, nevertheless trounces two prospective Republican opponents by more than 40 percentage points. Read More »

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said the East Coast earthquake Tuesday is another sign that U.S. cellphone networks are still not prepared for a major catastrophe, nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks.

From Washington, D.C. to New York City and elsewhere, untold numbers of people could not make calls on their cellphones Tuesday in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The mobile phone networks were so overcrowded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a statement asking the public not to use their cellphones to make calls, suggesting that email or text messages be used instead.

Shortly before that request was made, a spokesman for Verizon said there was “some network congestion for some customers as a result of spikes in calling in parts of the East for a short time after the tremors.” But the spokesman added that the system “has been returning to normal quickly now that the tremors have ended.” Read More »

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand voted against the debt-ceiling deal hammered out between congressional Republicans and the White House, saying the spending cuts would hurt the middle class and spare the wealthy.

Her fellow New York Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, voted for the deal, as did the two senators from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal and Joe Lieberman. While the measure passed easily, many of those who voted yes, like Lieberman, said they found it a distasteful but necessary piece of legislation.

Gillibrand, who is up for re-election next year, said in a statement she did not believe the bill “is a fair, well thought out, or balanced deal for our fragile economy.’” She also decried the deal-making that created the bill, saying it was “cut behind closed doors with zero transparency… stacked in favor of large corporations who exploit loopholes and the wealthiest among us.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announced Monday she will campaign for the Democratic candidate in a special election for a western New York House seat, adding more national attention to a race that some have called a bellwether for the 2012 congressional elections.

The race is notable because it is for the seat vacated by Rep. Chris Lee, a married Republican who sent out shirtless pictures of himself after posting an Internet personal ad.

Erie County Clerk Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is challenging Republican state Assemblywoman Jane Corwin in the May 24 election. The district, which is heavily Republican, stretches from the northeastern suburbs of Buffalo to the western suburbs of Rochester.

One wrinkle: Tea party candidate Jack Davis, a former Democrat, has spent more than $1 million of his own money, building a campaign that has siphoned off enough GOP support to make the contest competitive. A recent poll showed Hochul garnering 31% of the vote, Corwin grabbing 36% and Davis with 23%. Read More »

Adopting a tried-and-true political strategy used by successful New York senators before her, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand announced she raised more than $3 million in campaign donations in the first three months of the year.

In political terms, $3 million raised in 2011 is worth much more to an incumbent than $3 million raised in 2012, when she is up for re-election. A big campaign account often scares off would-be challengers. Sen. Charles Schumer did much the same, as did the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan before him.

“I am proud to tell you that we have broken our all-time highest campaign record” for fundraising in one quarter, Gillibrand wrote in an e-mail to supporters Friday. Read More »

New York Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer joined celebrities and public officials in a series of new online ads calling on Albany to legalize same-sex marriage.

The 30-second spots organized by the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-right group, cast both senators in starring roles.

“Some say politicians have a hard time getting to the point,” says Schumer, who labored last year to roll back the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. “But I don’t. So I won’t mince words. All New Yorkers should have the freedom to marry the one they love.”

“Every generation in America has stood up against the injustice of their day,” Gillibrand says in another ad. “This is our moment. This is our fight.” Read More »